Armed But Not Alarmed

By Richard Ford

Published: March 21, 2000

NEW ORLEANS—
I find it hard to believe that my current hunting buddies and I have found a natural mouthpiece for our interests in the person of Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association. For one thing, we have virtually no use for assault weapons when we're out there hunting pheasants and ducks and deer. These animals aren't that dangerous.

For another thing, when we're sitting around the campfire we never speak in the tumid rhetoric of armageddon and violent conflict which Mr. LaPierre and his N.R.A. associates use much of the time. Like most Americans, we're happy when the government stays out of our personal business. But my bird-shooting pals (all voters, by the way, some Republicans, some Democrats, some Libertarians) don't tend to think that Washington's at war with us or that our legally appointed federal agents are ''jack-booted thugs'' or bucket-helmeted Nazis intent on imprisoning us in our own country (as an infamous N.R.A. fund-raising letter put it).

We don't believe -- as a former N.R.A. vice president, Neal Knox, apparently does believe -- that John F. Kennedy's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassinations were part of a drug-induced gun-control conspiracy aimed at ''disarming the free world.''

And we certainly don't think that by striving to restrict felons from gun ownership, restraining ordinary citizens' access to assault weaponry, and trying generally to reduce the availability of handguns, President Clinton has ''blood . . . on his hands'' and is guilty of tolerating violence in the land, as Mr. LaPierre said recently.

Maybe we've all just been out in the woods too long and gotten fuzzy. But the president's intent actually seems to be to lessen violence in America, whereas the N.R.A.'s gibberish sounds like the big lie strategy -- the corrupted logic and bizarre exaggeration associated with doomsday cults, the Montana Freemen, Aryan Nation types and other single-issue, antigovernment crazies who rely on apathy, sloganeering and fear to force their points into prominence.

What my friends and I do understand is that for hunters and target shooters, governmental regulation has long been part of our lives. The need and warrant of regulation come with increasing human population, with diminishing wilderness and wildlife numbers, with private ownership of land, with American prosperity -- with modernity itself. It's government's responsibility, using its licensing and restrictive authorities, to protect our ever-diverse and complicated populace, and to maintain a balance among our precious and conflicting interests in order that we can share the planet and its bounty as peaceably as possible.

So we don't shoot a hundred pheasants a day; we shoot three. We purchase hunting licenses. We use steel rather than lead pellets for migratory game birds. We are routinely required by law to pass a hunters' safety course before we go into the field with guns. And this is simply because guns (as well as people) are very dangerous, and we don't want to kill anyone. Such ordinary and sensible regulations rely on, among other things, our belief that in a sane and democratic nation regulation may become excessive, but need not, because reasonable people are watchful and can be relied on to do sensible things.

All this is enough to make one think that the ''natural'' alliance between the usually moderate and conservation-minded American hunter, and the fear-mongering paranoiacs running the N.R.A., isn't an alliance at all. Hunters and the ''gun culture'' may have some crossovers, but they have few inherent affinities if all they can be said to share is gun ownership. Indeed, when sportsmen wake up to this garish incongruity, either the N.R.A. leadership will start making sense or the organization will cease to hold our attention.

Note well: the gun-control issue will be a hot one in the November election. New York Gov. George Pataki -- a Republican -- and Vice President Al Gore have now clarified their quite sensible positions. American hunters, whoever you are, you might think extra long this time about your own as well as the country's well-being, and then once you view your convictions clearly, act on them at the polls.